Fated

On Fated, Jason Chung continutes to makes the case for himself as one of the L.A. beat scene's preeminent modern minimalists. He creates music that evokes at once the infinite blackness of deep space and the curving, gleaming chrome that moves through it.

Featured Tracks:

Science fiction is not cool. We can quibble about the particulars—are robots cool? sure, robots are cool—but in practice, there is no arguing that sci-fi is not cool. Even the Sci-Fi Channel hedged its bet and changed its name to Syfy. I am talking about dimly lit basements and damp, beige convention centers: these are not cool spaces. But Nosaj Thing, god bless him, has done his best to rebuke that notion, to find the sexiness buried under the jumpsuits. Along with Flying Lotus, the Brainfeeder continuum, a bunch of West Coast glitch-hop, and their spiritual forefather, El-P, Nosaj creates music that evokes at once the infinite blackness of deep space and the curving, gleaming chrome that moves through it. It is what plays when you type "Andromeda galaxy" in as your Uber destination.

Fated is Jason Chung’s third album in six years, and, zoomed out, it’s not so much an evolution as a continuation of the style he’s established. There’s an unearthly sense of calm to the entire affair: the beats skitter, sure, but the hi-hats on "Erase" sound like they’re echoing through an empty hull, not going haywire. Opener "Sci" takes a minute to breathe to life, runs a finger down some Vangelis chimes, then takes a minute to slowly retire. (At 2:22, it’s one of the longer tracks here.) Listen closer, though, and you can hear the progression Chung’s made over time, perhaps most clearly by looking at the series of "Light" tracks that stretch through to his first record. "Light #1", from 2009, recalls the laser-fire panic of Ikonika’s debut, which would come out the next year; 2013’s "Light 3", which closed off the warmer Home, looked toward '90s drum'n'bass while still making room for keening, heart-sick melodies; this album’s "Light 5" is a series of de-escalating pulses, at times registering as little more than a heartbeat.

Fated, in other words, is Chung’s case for himself as one of hip-hop’s preeminent modern minimalists, and the results are frequently sublime. You can imagine Thom Yorke hearing the pattering melancholy of "Medic" and quietly snapping his copy of King of Limbs over his knee. The otherworldly Primo boom-bap of "Realize", at 90 seconds, almost evokes the Midnight Eez or one of Dilla’s dusty old beat tapes, were it not for the wheezing cyborg synthesizers. All of the sonic choices on previous records were similarly meticulous, but here they’re assembled with the almost architectural grace of a Oneohtrix Point Never composition. While Fated follows a direct throughline from earlier Nosaj Thing albums, one can also draw a clear line to R Plus Seven’s fixation on dated computer tones, as well as its sense of slow-burn, alien awe. This is not without its dangers. Splitting the difference between ambient and hip-hop is generally a fast track toward adderall-core study music—shout out to Blue Sky Black Death—and, to be fair, Fated is an overwhelmingly pleasant listen. It is decidedly un-dazzling.

But quiet doesn’t mean it can’t also be daring. So many of Nosaj Thing’s contemporaries deal with in-the-red maximalism, all hyper-compressed drums and lens-flare dynamics. But while FlyLo looked at Blade Runner and saw great plumes of fire and neon street fights, Nosaj Thing saw something else: two robots falling in love. Accordingly, Fated’s deeply electronic soundscape is most striking for its humanity. Throughout the record, Chung extracts vocal lines like threads of gossamer, treating human voices like violas to bow in much the same way that, say, Prefuse 73 treated them as toms to thwack. On "Cold Stares", the most vocal track of Nosaj Thing’s discography, Chance the Rapper charts the dark corners of this possibility space, musing and sighing and crooning in a robot-human duet. This is a very small sort of revolution, suggesting, like Spike Jonze’s Her, that the delineations between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi might not be so rigid, and that our transhumanist future might still find room for some of life’s more corporeal pleasures.